Founders Give up Rights to Control Their Organization

The Integral Center First to Legally Adopt New “Purpose-Driven” Business Model Outside of Model Developers

Boulder, Colorado April 2nd, 2013—In a legally binding move, founders of The Integral Center, LLC have voluntarily relinquished their rights to control their company as owners. Instead, they have ceded authority to a purpose-centered governance process called Holacracy, a model that distributes authority across the organization and gives primary power to the organization itself.

The Integral Center—a development and training organization committed to fostering thriving communities around the globe—is the first organization in history to adopt Holacracy on a legally binding basis, outside of HolacracyOne, the organization that developed the model. Dozens of organizations around the world use Holacracy without the legally binding status.

With this ratification, all Integral Center decisions must align with the organization’s purpose. The founders—Decker Cunov, Robert MacNaughton, and Bryan Bayer—retain equity interests, and their perspectives and aims as investment stakeholders will continue to be integrated through the Holacracy process.

“The ‘secret ingredient’ to our success has always been our priority on our mission over any one person’s personal gain,” said Decker Cunov, president, “yet this is the first time we’ve made that priority explicit and legally binding. The most exciting part is that it requires us to continually ‘eat our own dogfood,’ no matter what economic or political tensions might distract us from the purpose that brought these extraordinary communities together in the first place.”

For-profit companies focused on maximizing shareholder value above all else often do so at the expense of people and the planet. Non-profit organizations which focus on serving social good above profits are often limited in delivering on their missions due to lack of financial resources. Novel alternatives such as the stakeholder model and the “B-Corp” (benefit corporation) have emerged in an attempt to synthesize these two paradigms. Holacracy goes further yet, empowering “for-purpose” organizations to maximize stakeholder interests, profits, and social benefit, within a higher context of organizational purpose.

Holacracy’s innovative system of self-organizing governance aligns harmoniously with the Integral Center’s mission to foster Integral community development worldwide, according to Robert MacNaughton, executive director. “This is the most important decision the Integral Center has executed since its inception,” MacNaughton said. “We’re proud to follow HolacracyOne’s pioneering leadership in this emerging paradigm of organizational governance.”

ABOUT THE INTEGRAL CENTER

The Integral Center hosts a vibrant and spacious community building in Boulder, Colorado providing ongoing classes, training programs, special events, and co-working space. In conjunction with this ratification, The Integral Center acquired Authentic World, a training company offering programs in communication, relationships, and community building. Together, they now serve as a hub for a burgeoning global network of Integral communities.